At the beginning of the second half of the match thousands of fans of Dynamo team started chanting "Christ is Risen!", an Interfax correspondent reports.

Thousands of fans of Lokomotiv team on the opposite side of the stadium responded by chanting "Truly He is Risen!"

The exchange took place several times.

The correspondent who has attended soccer matches for almost 50 years says it was the (first) occurrence of this kind in the history of Russian soccer.

The hymn Faith of Our Fathers begins around 1'20" minutes into this video, the finale of a concert of popular hymns under the title Faith of Our Fathers in the Point Theatre, Dublin, in January 1997, nearly three years after Riverdance burst on the scene at the same venue. The soloist is the late Irish tenor Frank Patterson.

The refreshing proclamation of their Christian faith by the Moscow football fans reminded me of a tradition we had at major Gaelic Football and Hurling games in Croke Park, Dublin, until the 1960s, the singing of Faith of Our Fathers before the National Anthem. It was eventually dropped 'in the spirit of ecumenism' as it was seen as identifying the Catholic faith too much with a narrow Irish nationalism. There's no doubt that there was a strain of the latter in the Gaelic Athletic Association, that organised these games and members were expelled if found playing or watching 'foreign games', which meant soccer, cricket, rugby and hockey, all of which were identified with the British occupation for centuries. 'The Ban', as it was known, has long since gone and no harm for that.

But I don't know if those with form of Irish nationalism that was somewhat anti-English were aware, as they sang Faith of Our Fathers with gusto, that the words (except for the third stanza) were written by an Englishman, Fr Frederick Faber. One of God's little ironies!

Americans are more familiar with the St Catherine melody that is also used for this hymn. I much prefer the melody I grew up with. It has something manly about it that the other lacks.

2 comments:

Some believe that God Save the King/Queen was first composed for Louis XIV.

Pearse was likewise half-English. Erskine Childers (Snr) was English. James Connolly was raised in Scotland.

There was always a strong Anglophobic current in the O'Connellite, AOH-Redmondite and Treatyite ersatz nationalism. The Treatyite Griffith said to Childers that he would listen to "no f*cking Englishman". Paradoxically their "constitutional nationalism" seen Ireland as a junior partner in a brutal English imperial project. The fascist wing of Fine Gael were the most disposed to a 'Faith and Fatherland' conception of nationality, in contradistinction to the more secular and pluralist tradition of the United Irishmen, the Young Irelanders, Eamonn De Valera etc

The British government seen the Church as potentially an instrument of its rule in Ireland. It felt it could be used as an alternative to political development. Unlike all other European states, Ireland thus had no established secular national culture at independence. Maynooth was established in the 1790s for these purposes. Richard Lalor Shiel on the adoption of the Maynooth Grant by the British Government in 1845 said:

"You are taking a step in the right direction. You must not take the Catholic clergy into your pay, but you can take the Catholic clergy under your care ... Are not lectures at Maynooth cheaper than State prosecutions? Are not professors less costly than Crown Solicitors? Is not a large standing army and a great constabulary force more expensive than the moral police with which by the priesthood of Ireland you can be thriftily and efficaciously supplied?"

James Downey wrote in his recent autobiography about how people in his youth took a great interests in international affairs and the wars in Eastern Europe. In many ways, what is now derisively referred to as 'DeValera's Ireland' by the Revisionist Establishment (Eoghan Harris, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kevin Myers, etc) was much less insular and far more progressive than modern Ireland.

About Me

A Catholic priest, a member of the Missionary Society of St Columban, from Dublin, Ireland, in the Philippines most of the time since 1971 but transferred back to Ireland in June 2017.
This is a purely personal blog, not representing the Columbans. My hope is that whatever appears here will in some way bring readers closer to Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel as proclaimed by the Cathoiic Church.